Entities From Elsewhere

In Drupal 8, we have now successfully ""entity'd all the things""*. But did you know that we can ""entity""* data from outside of Drupal? I don't mean importing or migrating, I mean using some external source as the data store. Imagine creating a view or setting the render options for data coming from a remote database, API, or even filestore. Whoa!

The Entity API is incredibly powerful, and it provides a uniform toolset for creating, managing, and rendering structured data. It also provides flexible options for swapping out the backend storage source. This means that Drupal will see that remote data as internal entities... so views, displays, references, rendering options, path alias, etc. all will continue to work as normal.

In this session, we will explore a few options for how to accomplish this. While this will be a fairly broad overview, we will dive deeply into code. The concepts should be accessible to most average users, but there will be some complex details. You should have a basic understanding of Entities 101, and some knowledge of custom entities would be helpful as well.

While we won't have the time to learn how to be experts in this area, you will leave with a good understanding of the theories and a few solid options to explore for your next project. You don't need to be an advanced developer to get alot out of this session, so don't be shy about joining. Once you understand the approach, Drupal 8 becomes an even more powerful tool for solving complex integration problems.

* Yes, I did use entity as a verb. After this session, you will too.

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